Ervin wrote:If you believe that karma exists you give it power that way. If you stop believing in karma then it stops existing. You create your world to a great extent with your beliefs or should I say expectations.

Thoughts

Thanks

Yes. Correct. However the scope of kamma is not only the thought object "kamma" but everything that can be thought or believed. The scope of kamma are all moments of arisen consciousness.

Some where in the sutta mentioned that consciousness cannot exist without a body. Consciousness only ends when an enlighten person dies. But the point that restrict my comprehending is what exactly that is happy during Nirvana? with no self/identity, no feelings/perception, no consciousness, no thoughts...there's no measurement to identify anything in that state. Hate to say this but it sounds like forever sleeping dead.

Ervin wrote:If you believe that karma exists you give it power that way. If you stop believing in karma then it stops existing. You create your world to a great extent with your beliefs or should I say expectations.

Thoughts

Thanks

This is silly. What you believe has no relevance on whether something is factual. For instance, whether you believe gravity exists or not doesn't change the fact that it exists. Besides, karma is witnessable. If you go and kill someone you'll be considered a bad person and people will be out to find you. If they catch you you'll either go to jail or be executed. That's karma in the here and now. Whatever you believe wouldn't change the fact that you're ass is going to jail if you get caught.

Well, ground meant if you were atheist then you would achieved nibbana after death in atheist's view, and noone cries about it. So now what exactly do you worry about nibbana?

Remember that at the Buddha's time, he didn't teach nibbana to lay people because of its difficulity, normally they were taught the way to heavens or better lives. Even after attained enlightenment, he didn't want to teach it. You asked a question far ahead of yourself

Ven. Sariputta once said let view nibbana as happiness, no more pain, no more age, no more disease, no more sadness, no more sorrow,.. just a few examples of its benefits, no more suffering

If we did not believe i gravity and we try to jump off a building that gravity still applies to us. Karma just happens to be a universal law that even if the people who do not believe in karma, people who believe in a creator god they also subject to the same laws of karma.

Yes technically if u are enlightened u could be an all superior being and you as do as you want, the problem is you do not see the point of being 'good' or 'evil' anymore and if were a Samyak Sambuddha who perfected the all his paramis, and who became enlightened for the sake of all sentient beings, and you practiced for many kalpas or aeons, with that kind of motivation like compassion. Would you suddenly be uncompassionate because he just can and because he can get away away with it? Anything is probable, but this is highly unlikely to happen.

I think it would not only lend perspective to this particular discussion but also help us to become more aware of the possible blindspots and critical oversights in our understanding of Buddhism. The essay elucidates how the received understanding of belief-as-the-essential-core-of-religion is ideologically laden with Western and Christian assumptions, such that it becomes problematic to apply it universally to the other wisdom and sacred traditions of the world, including Buddhism, which we have come to categorised under the label 'World's Religion'. The essay includes a discussion of how Henry Steel Olcott, co-founder of Theosophy, was blind to the ideology of belief driving his attempts at reviving what he perceived to be a Sinhalese Buddhism in decay, setting up Buddhist Sunday schools and composing the Buddhist Catechism in the style of Christian catechisms. He was eventually denounced by the Sinhalese Buddhists after he disparaged their veneration of the Buddha tooth relic. In relation to this Lopez writes:

'The fact that no Sinhalese Buddhist had produced a text that reduced Buddhism to its belief suggests that the category of belief is not so easily transferred from one society to another, and that those who seek to do so are subject to the consequences of their deed.'

Reads to me like an allusion to kamma!

Anyway, to pique your interest I've attached a screenshot of the concluding paragraph.

Kamma, volition and tanha are three words for the same thing: the drive to become, to be-- "I-making." At least according to the Suttas.

AN 6.63PTS: A iii 410Nibbedhika Sutta: Penetrative "Intention, I tell you, is kamma. Intending, one does kamma by way of body, speech, & intellect.

Best explanation I ever found to explain the relationship/equality of these three terms is in Ven. Dr. Walpola Rahula's What the Buddha Taught.

In fact I went ahead and did the work. Here's the very passage:

Of these four, the last mentioned 'mental volition' is the will to live, to exist, tocontinue, to become more and more. It creates the root of existence and continuity,striving forward by way of good and bad actions (kusalakusalakamma). It is thesame as 'Volition'(cetana). We have seen earlier that volition is karma, as theBuddha himself has defined it. Referring to 'Mental volition' just mentioned abovethe Buddha says: 'When one understands the nutriment of mental volition oneunderstands the three forms of 'thirst'(tanha)'.

Thus the terms 'thirst', 'volition', 'mental volition' and 'karma' all denote thesame thing : they denote the desire, the will to be, to exist. To re-exist, to becomemore and more, to grow more and more, to accumulate more and more. This is thecause of the arising of dukkha, and this is found within the Aggregate of MentalFormations one of the Five Aggregates which constitute a being.

Here is one of the most important and essential points in the Buddha'steaching. We must therefore clearly and carefully mark and remember that thecause, the germ, of the arising of dukkha is within dukkha itself, and not outside; andwe must equally well remember that the cause, the germ, of the cessation of dukkha,of the destruction of dukkha, is also within dukkha itself, and not outside.

Which I think is one of the best passages I've ever read.

How it connects to belief: isn't "belief" an intentional act? Do --or do we not -- choose our beliefs? I will tell you that in a conversation with arch-skeptic Dr. Ray Hyman he absolutely astounded me (not an easy thing to do BTW) by flatly stating to me, "I have no control over my beliefs."

BB

Author of Redneck Buddhism: or Will You Reincarnate as Your Own Cousin?